THE THREE TENORS

But who rules the roost?

MOST hen pens have a cockerel who will control the birds and literally rule the roost. Well more by accident than design I somehow ended up with three of them when I began to collect the rare breed Scots Dumpys and while each displays quite different characteristics you can set your watch by them.

The Adhan - Islamic call to prayer

 In fact I was quite amused when scientists recently concluded that cockerels will instinctively crow at the same time every day regardless of whether they can see dawn breaking or not - this is great for me as a Muslim living in the Scottish Borders. Yes we are a bit of a rare breed too and with the nearest mosque being around 50 miles away, it is unlikely I will ever hear the call to prayer from Edinburgh. Plus most mosques in the UK are banned from allowing the call to be made unlike in most Muslim countries where a cacophony of calls to prayers known as The Adhan can reverberate across towns and cities.

 So thanks to my three cockerels I don't need to set my clock for the dawn prayer, known as Fajr which is the first of five daily prayers offered by practising Muslims. My 'three tenors' wake me up with their voluminous cock-a-doodle-doos every morning regardless of the weather.

Napoleon & Josephine

 But let's return to my feathered friends. As I say they are all quite different and the oldest is, I believe, Napoleon who came to me from Northampton with his soul mate Josephine. He was not the first rooster but he is, without doubt, the alpha male in the group and set about asserting his authority with all the hens on the day he arrived. Despite his duties as lead rooster, Napoleon and Josephine share the same cree every night and are inseparable on an evening.

 Napoleon is black and has a superb scarlet comb (the red bit on top of his head) and a magnificent pair of wattles (the two dangly bits below his chin). He often shakes his head and shows off his wattles and the whole performance is known as "tidbitting" and is designed to attract the other hens, which it does.

 This had a salutory effect on the light cuckoo-coloured rooster Horatio, hatched in a hen house in the Isle of Wight last June, who was ruler of the roost until Napoleon arrived. Poor Horatio has some catching up to do but I think the arrival of another, more senior rooster, has knocked his confidence.

 And just when he thought things couldn't get worse they did when Jumpin' Jack crashed onto the scene from leafy Cheshire. Despite being younger than Horatio he bounces around the pen on his long legs producing an annoying swagger. The perfect bred Scots Dumpy is supposed to have very short legs and a boat-like shape which almost causes it to waddle as it makes its way around, but JJ's long-legged defect doesn't seem to concern him at all.

 Not only does he spend his day ducking and diving out of the way of the other two roosters, it appears the majority of hens don't like him either and get quite aggressive when he comes a courting ... in the poultry world it's called treading! He's very pushy and has already had a downward effect on egg production because his unwanted and unwelcome attention has upset some of the hens.

 I am getting another coup built and I think that JJ will have to move out for a while to give the hens some breathing space.

 In the meantime here are my three roosters giving their best cock-a-doodle-doos for the camera - first up is JJ, followed by Horatio and last but not least Napoleon with a tidbitting demo as well. Which one do you think excels? And if you are a poultry expert any advice would be gratefully received in the interests of maintaining harmony among my chooks.